Stumbling through the interwebs I found a site called ‘Graphic-ExchanGE‘. I was surprised that neither Rachel nor I had ever come across it before, because the particular aesthetic which the sites founder Fabien Barrel admires is very very closely aligned to our own…. infact I have not spent this much time on a singular site since I first stumbled across Misprinted Type and {ths} a long long time ago. His excellence page is exactly that, a page of pure graphic excellence, covering genre’s such as Identity, interior, editorial and graphic design as well as illustration and photography - I will pull out a few particular graphics below… but I strongly recommend visiting the site and spending a healthy amount of time there.
Craig Atkinson is a UK based illustrator producing some lovely scratchy illustrations… sometimes naïve in style - but still wonderfully expressive in terms of capturing mood & expression.. love the celebrity portraits:
Craig is also the joint founder of Café Royal, a zine & underground press purveyor which sells some lovely wares through it’s online shop.
We recently travelled across the New South Wales highlands scouting locations for a photoshoot - to be incorporated into a couple of exhibitions later in the year… These are a couple of the shots with a quick treatment…
It seems inevitable that this post be written… so why write another one? I guess because there are so many different Wordpress appreciation posts / top plugin lists, each person focuses on their own particular application of the Wordpress system to their context and requirements, meaning each is slightly different - and while I have read many excellent posts covering these topics, in building this site I have used various bits and pieces drawn from a variety of sources. This post is also a way of giving something back to the Wordpress developer community - as the best form of marketing in any context is having people talking positively about your product without have to ask them to do so. So here is a roundup of the techniques and plugins that make this site tick:
Plugins (all these plugins are 2.5.1 compatible)
Admin drop down menus: This plugin ends up in every build of Wordpress we do, essentially it creates a drop down menu for each of the Wordpress categories (Write: Page / Post etc). The developer is Ozh and in his words: Replaces admin menus with a CSS dropdown menu bar. Saves lots of clicks and page loads!
Configurable Tag Cloud: As the name suggests, this provides you with a bit more control over the tag cloud display. Developed by Keith Solomon.
Dashboard Editor: Again, this plugin goes into every build. Very useful for cleaning up and customising the Wordpress dashboard. Developed by Aaron Harun.
Fold Page List: The great this about this plugin is it’s compatibility - all of the existing functionality of ‘wp_list_pages‘ can be used, “simply replace the code fragment that looks like this <?php wp_list_pages ($arglist); ?> with this: <?php wswwpx_fold_page_list ($arglist); ?>. But what does this plugin actually do? In short it enables you to display the top level pages in a list, then once you click into a particular top level page, the listing of pages will now display the child pages aswell. Describing this plugin using text is kinda like describing a painting using text “Well there is a tree on the right hand side and err… a human.. and the sky is nice… yeah real nice…”. I recommend viewing Webspaceworks visual explanation.
Similar Posts: This is a great little plugin (and much easier to explain). It enables you to generate a listing of similar content found elsewhere on your site. All settings are configurable, meaning you can adjust the way the plugin decides how content is actually related - for example: 30% heading, 50% content, 20% tags. Developed by Rob Marsh, SJ.
Simple Tags: This is another plugin that extends functionality already present in the Wordpress build. The main reason we use this plugin is for the ‘Click Tag’ functionality (display all preexisting tags for one-click insertion) - so we don’t create two very similar tags when one would suffice. However, it also has a swag of powerful global tag management functions which seem good aswell. Developed by Amaury BALMER.
WP Super Cache: This plugin create a static HTML version of your Wordpress site. In the developers words “WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts.” They also brag somewhere that this plugin will make your Wordpress site Digg proof… Developed by Donncha O Caoimh.
Role Manager: Great for client sites. Allows custom roles to be created and named something relevant. Useful even if all you do is rename the existing User accounts. Developed by Owen Winkler.
That’s it so far. I plan to do a couple more these Wordpress posts that delve deeper into the Wordpress web… but this should serve as a useful initial roundup.
Just down the road from where we are working (see Laughing Waters post) is an old mud brick house… National Parks Victoria just acquired it for a multi-million dollar sum and while their primary interest was the 40 hectares or so of hills and river frontage, we are far more taken by the abandoned human habitat’s to be found on the property. It must have been quite the party house in the 60’s / 70’s, pumping water straight out of the Yarra the grounds would have been lush - grounds filled with water features, ponds, tennis court & pool, all of which is now in a glorious state of decay. We are interested in staging a few different photoshoots for an exhibition later in the year, however the photos below are just playing around… getting used to the space… You can probably tell from the images that we thought the old pool was pretty crash hot.
Bjork’s new 3d film clip ‘Wanderlust’ is a feast for the eyes… it is one if not the best music video I have seen in a while… great cyclical concept and fantastic execution. Wanderlust was produced by Ghost Robot of NYC.
I have always loved the (Australian) designs of Petey Carey books…. maybe because I am a huge fan of his writing, I have read all of his books over the years and therefore have been able to admire a string of gorgeous cover designs by Jenny Grigg. It is pretty hard to track down much information about her - except that she came to book cover design from designing magazines and CD sleeves… and that in 2002 “she was named young designer of the year,g winner for best designed cover of the year and co-winner for best designed literary fiction book” (quoted from smh.com.au).
We are currently on an artist in residence at Laughing Waters just outside of Melbourne on the Yarra River. We are there to produce works for a couple of exhibitions later this year - and it is also a mighty fine place to sit and do some of our design work.
